Lore - Lore 230: Gilded
Episode Date: June 19, 2023Despite being known for being a “mile high”, the folklore and history of one American city is filled with more than enough darkness hidden away down below. Written and produced by Aaron Mahnke, wi...th research by Cassandra de Alba and music by Chad Lawson. ———————— Lore Resources: Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources All the shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ———————— This episode of Lore was sponsored by: Stamps: Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at Stamps.com/LORE. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! KiwiCo: Redefine learning with play—explore hands-on projects that build creative confidence and problem-solving skills with KiwiCo! Get 50% off your first month, plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line at kiwico.com/LORE. SimpliSafe: Secure your home with 24/7 professional monitoring for just $15 a month. No contracts, no salespeople, just simple and easy security. Sign up today at SimpliSafe.com/Lore to get 20% off your order with Interactive Monitoring. To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to sales@advertisecast.com, or visit our listing here. ©2023 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.
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He's been around for 85 years, so I'm just going to assume that everyone knows who I'm
talking about when I mention Superman.
You can probably close your eyes and conjure up an image of him in your mind that red and
blue costume, those touches of yellow, and that long, billowy cape.
Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings
in a single bound, yada yada, you get the idea.
But back in 2008, a team of archaeologists discovered an artifact that probably made them wish for
another of the man of steel's powers. His X-ray vision. You see, they'd uncovered an ornate
12th century pendant in a medieval garbage layer beneath the German city of mines,
but it was so corroded and damaged by time
that they didn't want to risk opening it up to see what was inside.
Yes, doing so would give them an answer, but it also meant that the pendant, which
was sort of like a painted gold, cross-shaped box, would be destroyed forever.
So they used a Superman-like technology, known as prompt gamma ray activation analysis,
which essentially shoots neutrons at
an object, and then when the materials it's comprised of bounce them back, it measures the ways in which
those particles are now different. And that information told them what was hidden beneath a golden outer
layer. Human bones, finger bones to be precise, and while the team of researchers had no way of
knowing who the bones belonged to, their best guess was that it was some sort of saintly reliquary.
And it teaches us all an important lesson.
Even the prettiest of containers can hold something much more dark and grim.
All around us are objects, buildings, and entire cities that seem to be home to one sort
of thing.
But if we look deep enough, we're bound to discover the shadows that lie beneath.
I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore. They named it for the color.
When the earliest Spanish explorers arrived in the area on the southeastern edge of
the Rocky Mountains, they noticed the red stone along the river, and they gave the region
the name it had ever since.
Cutlerado.
What they didn't know at the time was just how rich the history of the area already was.
With human occupation going back at least 12,000 years, there was once a time when the
original inhabitants of the land hunted animals that would leave us all stunned today.
The mammoth were there, as were bison much bigger than today's modern buffalo.
There were even camels back then, and sloths as big as a bear.
Those paleolithic people stuck around.
They settled in and built a powerful culture.
About a thousand years ago,
these ancestral peblowings,
also known as the Anasazi,
reached their golden age.
You've probably seen photos of the incredible city
they left behind in what is now the Mesa Verde National Park,
a sprawling complex
of mud brick buildings constructed beneath the massive ledge.
And yes, fans of the X-Files will probably hear the name Anasazi and associate it with
images of burnt alien corpses inside a buried train car.
As a guy who watched that episode when it was brand new almost 30 years ago, I am right
there with you.
By the time the Europeans arrived in the area though,
Colorado was home to more than just that culture.
The Yut, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Apache,
and Shashoni peoples were all there
in various parts of the region,
and had been for a very long time.
But right from the very beginning of European involvement,
the history of the region has been painted
in a golden light,
and that's left us with folklore that people still whisper about today. of European involvement, the history of the region has been painted in a golden light,
and that's left us with folklore that people still whisper about today.
In the 1500s, Spanish explorers heard stories about golden cities like Cibola and Cuvira.
These mythical places, though, were products of a bit of misunderstanding.
Cibola was real enough, but it was more of an economic hub for the indigenous peoples,
rather than a city
literally built out of golden bricks. Kavira turns out to be a completely made-up place, though.
It seems that the Spanish invaders were causing so much trouble, death, and destruction,
that the local people invented a golden city far off in the wilderness,
told the Spanish about it, and then watched them march off in search of it.
Honestly, you've got to love the creativity of it all, right?
A lot's happened since then.
The area that is Colorado today would eventually become part of the French territory that
spanned much of the central part of modern North America, what they called Louisiana.
Then in 1803, the United States bought most of that territory, which is why it's called
the Louisiana Purchase. Now for a long while, the United States didn't really that territory, which is why it's called the Louisiana Purchase.
Now for a long while, the United States didn't really want much to do with the Colorado
region.
It was just a whole bunch of useless deserts as far as they were concerned.
It wasn't nearly as good for farming as the middle of the Midwest, so the native peoples
living there were left alone.
That is until 1858, when something was discovered that suddenly made Colorado worth stealing from them.
Gold.
Now, the first American Gold Rush had been in California, and started back in 1848, but by
1855 it was over, and people were looking for a new, get-rich, quick scheme.
The Colorado Gold Rush gave them exactly that, and with visions of wealth and fame in their
minds, people flock to Colorado
by the thousands.
To help folks prepare for the journey, some people in the Midwest set up supply shops,
where gold seekers could buy wagons, supplies, and even oxen.
There was a time in the winter and spring of 1859, where towns along the Missouri River
were recording upwards of 400 people a day passing through on their way to a better life.
It was a true migrant caravan, in the literal sense.
Now, we've all heard about mining towns before.
Wherever a bunch of people flocked to a place to dig in the ground,
towns would spring up around them.
They typically existed to serve the needs of the gold seekers,
so things like boarding, alcohol, gambling, and supply stores, that sort
of thing.
And one of those outfitting stations was a little place called Denver.
It started out as a dusty little supply town, and it wasn't really better or more special
than any of the others that I can tell.
The one newspaper in November of 1859 called Denver an unimportant place, and not everyone
made it rich.
In fact, the good majority of that white American migrant caravan that flocked to the area
ended up leaving soon after because gold mining was hard work and they were just looking
for a quick easy buck.
For the few who did find the shiny stuff though, their wildest dreams came true.
That gold changed their lives, and all of that left its mark on the town that would
someday become the mile high city. That gold changed their lives, and all of that left its mark on the town that would someday
become the mile high city.
But as you might expect, not everything was perfect.
Beneath all that glittering wealth, there was also a layer of darkness. In a city as big as Denver, it's impossible to cover everything.
Thankfully there are a handful of places that seem to play host to a bit more of the
shadows than most others, so that's where we'll focus today.
Places like the Crook Patterson Mansion.
It gets its name from a guy named Thomas Crook, who worked as a merchant in the city, eventually
going on to become a state senator.
Then according to the bio on the mansion's website, he also maintained a hobby as an,
and I quote, experimental, plant breeder, which, I mean sure, it's not a tabletop role
playing game, but apparently he loved it.
The mansion he built there went up in 1891.
It's crafted of red sandstone
from the region and was designed to look like a French castle from the 1500s. That's
what rich people did back then, of course. Use new money to copy old things and buy a
sort of false history.
Crook though didn't stay in his castle long, selling it just two years later to Thomas
and Kate Patterson. Thomas also had a political career of his own, starting out as a territorial delegate back in 1874,
all the way up to time as a US senator in the first decade of the 1900s.
After that, the home passed on to their daughter Margaret until 1924,
when it was sold and converted into various businesses, like a music school and a radio station.
After that, it took on a life as an apartment building, converted into various businesses, like a music school and a radio station.
After that, it took on a life as an apartment building, before finally getting converted
into a boutique hotel about a decade ago.
And while that's a lot of mundane history, there's a lot that can happen in a place
over the course of 130 years.
Stories get told, rumors are whispered, and things are experienced.
Things like the death of a woman named Tuline Sudan back in 1950.
According to the stories, she took her own life after suffering through a difficult
miscarriage by sealing up her third floor room and filling it with a cyanide-based pesticide
gas.
And ever since, there have been reports of all sorts of sightings that seem to have their
roots in her story.
Over the years, many people have spotted the ghostly figure of a sad,
mournful woman in various parts of the building. Some people passing by on the street have
glanced up to see her standing in one of the third floor windows, staring blankly toward them.
Others have heard the sound of a crying baby in the distance, but have never been able to track down the source.
Then there's the Brown Palace Hotel. Built in 1892 in the Italian Renaissance style,
it uses more of that same red sandstone and granite that makes up the bones of Colorado.
But one thing it wasn't made of was wood. Wanting to avoid the various hotel-fire tragedies
that had plagued other cities,
the builder, Henry Brown, used only iron and concrete for the structure, hoping it would make the
place fireproof. But while you can plan for specific things like fire, the hotel quickly became
home to something a lot more unpredictable. Human nature, and in 1911, that manifested in the form of a deadly love triangle.
Isabelle Patterson was a local woman married to a businessman named John Springer, but
rather than spend time at home, she had a suite of her own right there at the Brown Palace
Hotel, where she entertained not one, but two different lovers. One of them was her husband's
business partner, a guy named Frank Henwood, and the other,
I kid you not, was a balloon pilot and adventurer named Sylvester von Foule.
Seriously.
Now, I don't know the finer details, like whether or not the lovers knew of each other's
existence, or whether Isabelle's husband John suspected anything.
Honestly, the fact that his wife used to sweet at the brown probably served as a big clue,
but who knows.
But what I do know is that at some point in 1911, the balloon pilot Sylvester visited
the husband John and showed him the love letters that Isabel had written for him, and then
tried to blackmail him.
John confronted his wife and told her to take care of it, so Isabel enlisted her other
lover, Frank, to get the letters back.
Those two lovers met one evening
at the bar downstairs in the brown.
I would assume they were there to discuss the situation
and maybe hand over the letters.
But instead, Frank pulled a gun
and handed Sylvester a bullet, killing him,
and another innocent bystander in the room.
The subsequent trial might have seen Frank get convicted for murder and then saved from execution by none other than Isabel's
husband John, but it's the stuff that's happened since the murder that people
talk about the most. Stories of unexplainable experiences that have filled the
hearts of various guests there, with fear. Many stories talk about how lights in the
hotel have a tendency to turn on and off on their own.
At least one person has seen what they could only describe as a shape beneath the carpet,
slowly crawling toward them, and some guests have spotted the ghost of someone in an unusual uniform,
walking through the hall on the ground floor that's close to where the old railway ticket office once stood. Back in the 1940s, one of the regular residents of the hotel was Louise Crawford Hill, a wealthy
socialite who moved into room 904 after her husband passed away.
She lived there well into the 1950s before passing away herself, and then years later
the entire floor was renovated, which involves stripping each of the rooms down to the studs
and clearing everything out, including room 904. During the construction, though,
the switchboard operator there in the hotel began to report mysterious phone calls. At first,
it was probably just annoying. They would hear the ringing, go to answer it at the switchboard,
and never be nothing on the other end of the call but static and bits of silence.
But the most frightening thing of all was where the calls appeared to be coming from.
According to the lights on the switchboard, they could be traced back to one specific place
in the building, in an area that should not have guests because of the construction.
The calls were coming from Room 904.
It was created out of necessity.
If you remember from earlier, there was a long while there were the United States government
didn't really have a use for Colorado, so they left the indigenous peoples alone.
A lot of Denver, it seems, was a rapaholand, used primarily as their winter homeland.
But as I said before, when gold was discovered in 1858, all of that changed.
That same year, the folks in the Denver area realized that they
needed to bury their dead, so they set up the Mount Prospect Cemetery. This wasn't a
little plot behind someone's house, though. No, Mount Prospect was a massive 160 acres.
Maybe they expected a lot of dead, or perhaps they were just planning for the future. I don't
really know. A few years later, 40 acres of that land was sold off to become a Catholic burial ground
known as Mount Calvary, and then in 1872, the federal government sold the land to the
city of Denver, with the stipulation that the land there only ever be used as a cemetery
and nothing else. And for the next decade or so, that's what it was, a burial ground
for the many dead of the city, reaching around 5,000 graves in total.
But remember, this was a big plot of land, covered in trees and shadows, and it quickly
became haunted by the outlaws looking to take advantage of folks who passed through
it.
Many of the cities poor and unhoused began to set up camp there too, and this was a problem
that the neighbors who lived around the cemetery wanted to fix.
Why?
Because they were rich and they didn't like looking at the lower class.
So they used their wealth and power to have Congress change the restrictions on the land.
And in the early 1890s, it was done.
They decided that they would use the space as a park instead.
Something the rich folks could enjoy from their windows.
And so the city set about moving all 5,000 burials to another place, nearby Riverside Cemetery.
They started by mailing letters to living family members, telling them that they had a couple
of months to dig up and transport their dead loved ones to Riverside.
Honestly, can you imagine getting that letter?
I have a hard enough time with a 30 days they give me to remember to pay my electric bill.
These folks though, had to move grandma's grave.
A lot of the bodies though weren't claimed, and so they hired a man named EP McGovern to
move the rest.
He was a local undertaker, which probably qualified him, and they paid him the equivalent
of about $30 per body, so in 1892 he got to work.
Except, well, he saw his own get-rich quick scheme
taking shape.
Instead of moving one body out and collecting $30 for it,
he brought in extra coffins and then divided body parts up
among them, essentially multiplying his profits.
He and his crew did this for months,
until he was caught and exposed by the local paper,
the Denver Republican.
The headline on March 19th of 1893 was, The Work of Goals, which, as you'd imagine,
ignited a firestorm of outrage.
MacGovern was fired, but instead of replacing him, the city just sort of called the job done
and moved on with their plans for the park, which left as many as 2,000 graves beneath
the topsoil.
And today, that's where they remain.
So if you ever visit the beautiful Cheeseman Park,
named for a pioneer of the city, Walter Cheeseman,
just remember that you're never really alone.
And that's how people have felt over the years.
Even back while it was still a graveyard,
people were reporting unusual activity.
One grave digger claimed that he was inside a new grave,
shovel in hand,
when a ghost literally jumped onto his shoulders. He apparently left immediately and called in sick
the next day. And honestly, who could blame him? Since the park's construction, though,
a number of people have reported feeling like they are being watched there. A few have reported
physical altercations with invisible forces that want to push them toward the ground.
Others have heard disembodied voices that seem to whisper up through the grass, and a
whole menagerie of ghostly figures have been spotted throughout the park.
Maybe the most frightening of all, the folks who have lived in the homes that surround
the park have also reported strange things over the years, as if the spirits are migrating
into other parts of the city.
Some residents have claimed to hear spirits knocking on their doors and windows at night,
and even unexplainable events that have taken place inside their homes.
Clearly, rest in peace isn't a slogan that accurately represents Chisborne Park,
and it goes beyond that, even the smaller Catholic cemetery, Mt. Calvary,
eventually converted into something else as well, Denver's goes beyond that, even the smaller Catholic cemetery, Mount Calvary, eventually
converted into something else as well, Denver's Botanic Gardens, and a good number of the
bodies there were left in the ground as well.
Heck is recently as last year, workers who were replacing a pond lining stumbled upon
a human arm bone.
It's no wonder that people there still report phantom visions, odd smells, and the occasional
touch from an
invisible hand.
It seems that we can cover up the past, but the shadows never really go away. The past is complicated.
No matter where you go or what culture you dig into, there are stories that both delight
and disgust.
Like a gilded box containing human bones, the places we live tend to be pretty worlds
built on shadow.
Denver represents the best and worst of Colorado.
It plays host to evidence of all the wealth and success of those early pioneers who came
there over a century and a half ago.
Their massive mansions dotting the landscapes like big reminders of a bygone era.
But the fact that it exists at all, right there on land taken away from people who originally
live there, is also a sad monument to the dangers of human ambition.
The story of Cheeseman Park is probably the best example of that duality.
Sure, it's gorgeous, who doesn't love a big open piece of nature in the middle of a
sprawling city, right?
But knowing the dark deeds that took place along the road to its construction has a way of leaving a bad taste in our mouths. It's beautiful, and built
on death. And it's a legacy that has made an impact far beyond Denver, too. Back in the 1960s,
a man named Russell Hunter moved into one of the old homes situated along Cheeseman Park,
then almost immediately began to experience
violent, unexplainable activity.
In fact, according to him,
it was the house's haunted past
that allowed him to get such a good deal
on the rent there in the first place.
Now, we probably need to take the stories
with a grain of salt.
I imagine the neighbors all helped repeat the old stories,
keeping them alive for a new generation,
so it's not hard to imagine Hunter hearing them after moving in.
Which parts are pure imagination, and which parts are truth, that's better left for you
to decide.
Hunter described how the house would often be filled with loud crashing noises that he
could never track down.
Fossets, lights, and doors all seem to take on a life of their own.
He even reported that sometimes the very walls of the house would vibrate as if a massive
train were passing right by on the street.
There's one story Hunter told about finding a secret staircase that led to a forgotten
bedroom.
In there he said he found a child's diary that mentioned being very sick and playing
with a favorite red rubber ball.
Days after discovering this macabre space, Hunter claimed that a red rubber ball
materialized out of thin air and dropped from the top of the spiral staircase in the house.
There were more violent experiences, too. Hunter reported that a glass door exploded
right in front of him, cutting his arms and face so deeply that he
needed surgery. Even the ceiling over his bed seemed to suffer some supernatural destruction.
Russell Hunter eventually moved out, and years later found himself working on a script for a
psychological horror film called The Changeling. As he helped write it, he began to include elements
from his frightening stay in that Denver mansion beside Cheezman Park, using those stories to flesh out the supernatural horror elements of the film.
And he left a little signpost in the script for future generations to follow.
If anyone is in doubt about where the inspiration came from, all they have to do is look at
the name of the house the film's main character lives in.
They called it, the
Cheesman House.
Denver is more than just the mile high city. I hope today's tour through Colorado's Dark History has helped you see the nuance and
complexity of everything that's come before.
I know it's made me look at green public spaces in a whole new light, that's for sure.
But our tour today isn't finished just yet, there's one more character from Colorado's
past that needs mention, partly for their legacy, but also because of the rumors that still
persist.
Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it.
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Margaret was born in 1867, back in the early days of the Colorado Gold Rush and the transition
to silver that followed it. Her parents were Irish immigrants who settled in Missouri and started a family in the 1860s,
which is where Margaret was born, but her story would take her to so many other places.
Fun fact, she was born in the Missouri town of Hannibal, the same place Mark Twain was born
and raised about three decades earlier.
Maybe that's why she believed that regular everyday people could do amazing things. After all, it had already been modeled for everyone in town.
At the age of 18, she moved to Colorado, to the mining town of Leadville. It had started
less than a decade earlier as one of the prime spots for the silver mining industry.
So by the time she arrived in 1885, it was already buzzing with excitement. Margaret herself
later said that she went looking for a rich husband.
Instead, she found Jim, 13 years her senior, who was dirt poor, and the couple fell in love and soon married.
In the tug of war between love and money, Margaret picked love, and you have to respect her for that.
Thankfully, the money showed up later.
It seems that Jim's engineering skills were key to discovering a massive seam of silver ore at a local mine,
and soon enough his employer awarded him a huge stock bonus and a position on their board of directors.
Almost overnight, Margaret and Jim went from poor miners to high society.
She never let it get to her head though. She frequently worked in the soup kitchen that served the poorest of the mine workers. Yes, they bought a massive house, and yes, they also bought a summer home, but she didn't
sit around in the lap of luxury.
Instead, she gave lots of their money away and fought for the rights of women in her community.
In 1912, she was on a vacation in Paris when she received word that one of her grandchildren
was deathly ill, so she booked passage to return as quickly as she could. Tragically, that ship encountered trouble and sank before reaching the east coast of America,
but Margaret somehow survived. More than that, she fought to pull survivors into her lifeboats
and even managed fun raising for the poorest of the survivors before a rescue ship could even arrive.
She managed to collect the modern equivalent of close to $300,000, all because she cared for the people around her.
Today her home is a museum dedicated to her accomplishments, which include fighting fiercely
for women's suffrage, but those who have visited the place have spotted other things that
are less encouraging.
It seems that many have seen the ghostly figure of a woman in a Victorian dress wandering
the halls of the mansion.
Caretakers over the years have found furniture in the house mysteriously rearranged, and
light bulbs that have been found unscrewed and removed from their lamps.
Some visitors have even caught the scent of pipe tobacco, something that's blamed
on Margaret's husband, Jim.
Back in 1960, a Broadway musical took to the stage, written and composed by Meredith Wilson,
best known for the music man and the holiday song, its beginning to look a lot like Christmas,
and its title gave Margaret a nickname that she never had in life.
And while a lot of the story is fictional, it highlights her survival of that devastating
shipwreck, the sinking of the Titanic.
Oh, and the sinking of the Titanic.
Oh, and the name of the musical about her life?
The Unsinkable Molly Brown.
This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Manke, with research by Cassandra DeAlba and music by Chad Lawson.
Lore is much more than just a podcast.
There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television
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Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.
Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.
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And as always, thanks for listening.